Developer: Oneway Ticket Studio
Publisher: Oneway Ticket Studio
Platform: PC
Tested on: PC
The Midnight Walkers – Preview
Although Oneway Ticket Studio’s upcoming title The Midnight Walkers has been in Early Access since late January, chances are the game has flown under your radar up until reading about it here. The PvPvE extraction shooter hasn’t quite hit its stride yet. Is this one a hidden gem that is waiting to be discovered or is it a shambling corpse, waiting to be put out of its misery before it can even reach its full potential?
Before we get into The Midnight Walkers’ gameplay, let’s start by contextualizing what you’d be getting yourself into with the game: this is a first-person extraction shooter that leans heavily into survival horror and zombie apocalypse elements. Players can choose one of four unique classes, being Brick, Crow, Lockdown or Bartender, and enter raids either solo in small squads. The game is set inside the Liberty Grand Center, a massive multi-floor skyscraper infested with not just AI-controlled zombies but hostile players as well. You’ll have to deal with these threats over the course of 15-minute runs, where you scavenge loot, craft and trade equipment and then attempt to extract before losing everything you’ve gathered. The game takes heavy inspiration from games like Escape from Tarkov and ARC Raiders, although there is a much greater emphasis on claustrophobic indoor environments and melee combat.
As it stands, there is very little present in the game in terms of an unfolding story, with most of the narrative expecting you to be familiar with classic zombie tropes. Here’s hoping that the game does at least add some expanded and more interesting elements in the future, rather than the cookie-cutter zombie apocalypse setting that is currently in place. This, unfortunately, isn’t the only part of The Midnight Walkers’ presentation that is currently underdeveloped. While the Liberty Grand Center setting provides much more variety than you’d expect, with offices and hotel rooms but also botanical gardens and construction sites, the graphics are muddy and bland. This also makes navigating the complex a pain, as the tower lacks memorable landmarks to orientate yourself with. The game currently makes use of some AI-generated assets, although we’re hoping that these are simply placeholders and that The Midnight Walkers will build on that distinct visual identity it needs to stand out in the long run. The game’s soundscape also feels unfinished, relying more on ambience than anything else. We had to keep reminding ourselves that this is an unfinished, Early Access title and that its current focus is on gameplay.
It’s a shame then, that gameplay simply isn’t very good either. That is to say, our time with The Midnight Walkers was plagued with problems. Attack animations are very slow, and movement is sluggish as well. This is something that is less noticeable in the more agile Crow class, but the other three share much of the same sluggishness. Add janky weapon collision and unreliable hit detection, both at range and in melee, and you’ve got a game that simply doesn’t feel right. That’s without even getting into server connection failures that result in mid-match disconnects, lag spikes and objects and enemies failing to render at all. We could actually go on listing things that are simply bad here, whether it’s the botched UI, uneven item distribution or stash expansion locked behind grinding. It’s probably insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but we even ran into issues capturing gameplay footage, resulting in having to use the game’s official promotional screenshots for this preview.
This is the part of the review where we’d talk about what the different classes have to offer and what The Midnight Walkers’ potential as a PvP title is, but honestly, we’re going to tell you to simply hold off on picking this one up, at least until the game’s foundation is fixed. Unfortunately, there isn’t a roadmap for the game (or at least not one that we’re aware of) so we can’t quite tell you the timeframe within which we’d expect this one to be worth another shot. Because The Midnight Walkers is in such a sorry state, you’ll also find that queue times are long because the game’s player count is low. Lobbies often felt underpopulated, resulting in significant waiting relative to actual playtime. The writing’s on the wall, with players able to join matches mid-game being one of the latest updates. To their credit, Oneway Ticket Studio are hard at work fixing the game based on feedback, if The Midnight Walkers’ update schedule is any indication. It’s just that at this point, updates feel more like they’re haphazardly sticking flex tape over a leaking water tank rather than considering how to make their game engaging in the long run.
Conclusion
We’re not saying that The Midnight Walkers is dead before arrival, but if this one is to have even a smidgeon of a chance to cement itself, there’s a lot of work to be done yet. From the non-existent story to the muddy visuals to the bug-plagued gameplay, there’s nothing that the game gets right in its current state.
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